by Kirk Honeycutt
with an introduction written by Chris Columbus
Published by Race Point Publishing
1st Edition March 25, 2015
224 pages
To begin my sixth annual tribute to the life and legacy of Writer/Producer/Director John Hughes, who passed away from a heart attack on August 6, 2009, I will present to you the words of Writer/Producer/Director Chris Columbus:
"My first interview with John was at his Lake Forest complex. I entered John's office and sat there. Alone, waiting. at some point, John's young, usually frightened assistant walked in, carrying a fresh pack of Carlton cigarettes, a disposable lighter, and a glass ashtray. These items were carefully placed on a table beside John's chair. The assistant left the room and after a few minutes, John walked through the door. This particular ritual happened before every single meeting I ever had with John Hughes. Noting ever changed about it. Except the assistants."
I never met John Hughes.
During my entire adolescence while growing up in Chicago, finding myself completely enraptured by the films of John Hughes and eternally inspired to begin writing, I wanted absolutely nothing more than to make personal contact with the man himself. If I was to succeed in my quest, I really had no set plan as to what I would say were I able to release words from my voice. All I could have wanted was just some time to talk to him, to ask him about his films of course, but to also ask him about his writing regimen and his process as well as chat as extensively as possible about music and most of all, thank him profusely for all he has given to my life through his work. Just one chance to speak with him. That was all I wanted, even as I knew how unlikely such an occurrence would be.
Even so, I wrote fan letters, which to this day I have no idea if he ever saw them let alone read them. I would scour both the Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune for any Hughes related filming location tidbits with the hopes of maybe finding some way to reach the set and just have the chance to meet him. By my college years, with my dorm room always adorned with some Hughes related one-sheet poster, and also pursuing a Communication Arts degree with an emphasis in radio, television and film, I harbored many fantasies of somehow being able to find my way into working for him within his production company Hughes Entertainment. But the direction of my life did not precipitate the attempt of getting myself involved in any aspect of the movie business, so of course, any chance of meeting John Hughes within that specific context evaporated.
Even with my endless fascination and pursuit, by some time in the 1990's, I found myself feeling unsure if I did want to meet him after all due to his increasing reputation within the Hollywood industry for possessing a legendary volcanic temper, as well as erratic behavior and a precious sensitivity that afforded him the ability to hold personal grudges against others that Molly Ringwald referred to as being nearly "supernatural," in her beautifully written remembrance "The Neverland Club," as published in The New York Times on August 11, 2009, five days after Hughes' passing.
The idea that my hero, John Hughes, an artist who opened up a new way of looking out at the world and into myself so completely, could possibly be a misanthropic, embittered individual gave me serious pause. (Frankly, I still cannot wrap my head around the man having been politically affiliated with the Republican party based upon the films he made and the themes contained therein, but I digress...) I mean--what if I had the chance to meet him and he was...well...an asshole? I guess I was afraid to have whatever image I had conjured up of him, as constructed through his work as well as interviews he and his collaborators had given, tampered with or even destroyed. But still, I wished for that day to occur nonetheless.
In March of this year, I purchased a new book that offered greatly to jointly fill in some of the gaps while also continuing the mystery of who John Hughes was as a human being and how that contributed to his artistry. Author and former Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt's John Hughes: A Life In Film, is a lavishly presented coffee table book that I believe that most fans of Hughes would salivate over. Covering the entirety of Hughes' life, from his upbringing, his advertising career, his tenure as a Writer and Editor at National Lampoon magazine to his iconic filmography and up to his 2009 passing, Honeycutt has delivered a colorful, handsome tome that works as a fine companion piece to Author Susannah Gora's excellent You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes And Their Impact On A Generation and Director Matt Austin Sandowski's documentary "Don't You Forget About Me" (2009), which I profiled in the August 2011 section of this blogsite.
Honeycutt instantly reeled me in with a grand slam of an opening that spoke directly to my fascination with the type of person that John Hughes may have been: the Forward as written by filmmaker Chris Columbus, who directed two of Hughes' highest box office smashes, "Home Alone" (1990) and "Home Alone 2: Lost In New York" (1992). as well as the romantic comedy drama "Only The Lonely" (1991), which Columbus also wrote and Hughes produced.
It was the very type of crisp and connective storytelling that made me wish for more as Columbus described his memories of working directly with John Hughes as they collaborated on "Home Alone" from pre to post-production, some of which I presented in the opening of this year's tribute. Certainly, I will not spoil for you the remainder of Columbus' story as I wish for you to purchase this book and read it for yourselves. But I will say that Columbus' recollections of that period are filled with a compellingly intertwined sense of awe, frustration, appreciation, confusion and ultimately, a reverence that was profoundly moving to read and also mirrored the emotions I felt whenever I found myself wondering precisely who the individual behind the treasured films actually was.
After such a magnetic opening, in many ways, the remainder of Kirk Honeycutt's John Hughes: A Life In Film, does not disappoint. From beginning to end, this lushly illustrated tribute is loaded with all manner of film analysis throughout from Honeycutt, plus a plethora of photos as well as new interviews conducted with many of Hughes' actors and associates including Matthew Broderick, Steve Martin, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Jon Cryer as well as Costume Designer Marilyn Vance, Directors Howard Deutch, Patrick Read Johnson and the aforementioned Columbus among others. And of course, we hear from the man himself, John Hughes, through his archived interviews and comments.
For John Hughes' most treasured material, Honeycutt spends the most time and therefore, provides the most material one could wish to read about. The section covering Director Harold Ramis' "National Lampoon's Vacation" (1983), which Hughes scripted from his original National Lampoon short story entitled "Vacation '58," published in 1979 (and written while bunkered at his home during the historic "Blizzard of '79"), represented a fine example of how well and deftly Honeycutt has been able to track and detail the evolution of a film from its gestation period into the final version that has become a comedy classic. Yet, once he delves into Hughes' "golden period" with his sextet of high school chronicles, the book becomes a veritable treasure trove of information and insight.
With the section devoted to "Sixteen Candles" (1984), Honeycutt not only recounts the writing, casting and production of the film itself, while also giving us some thoughtful analysis of the finished film along the way, I did appreciate how a sub-section entitled "The Long Duk Dong Controversy," directly addressed the serious viewpoint that this character, as played by actor Gedde Watanabe, has long served as a catalyst for debate of harmful to dangerous racial stereotypes presented in cinema. It was interesting to me to see how the character may have originated from Hughes' own family and had clearly been filtered through a National Lampoon lens, but that the overall intent was not to offend despite the fact that for so many the character is deeply offensive. Watanabe provides a compelling insight into his working relationship with Hughes in regards to constructing what they each felt to be a broadly comic character, from what was included in the film and to what was edited from the final version.
The lengthy section devoted to "The Breakfast Club" (1985), quite possibly Hughes' most celebrated film, has been well documented in film based publications as well as Gora's book. Even so, Honeycutt has unearthed and contained some especially fascinating material, including the brief casting of Rick Moranis as Carl the Janitor as well as more information about the brief addition of a curvaceous female teacher who gives some of the characters, and the audience, a bit of a peep show, an element that was cut from the final film, either through protests from Ringwald and Sheedy or whether Hughes ever really intended to use such a sequence anyway.
What is clear is that for all of Hughes' mastery as a writer, to which all interviewed participants attest time and again, he was never married to his material to a detrimental degree. Once the cameras began to roll, the written word combined with a healthy spirit of collaboration and improvisation congealed beautifully, creating a film set atmosphere that many of his actors have continued to express they have never experienced in quite the same way before or since (although Hughes' process would cause Script Supervisors and Editors massive headaches due to the ever changing and mountainous amount of material collected). Also of note is the sub-section entitled "High School Fashion Show," during which Honeycutt has Marilyn Vance, one of Hughes' longest serving collaborators, displays her original costume boards for the five principal characters of "The Breakfast Club," again showing how another individual's talents was able to bring Hughes' original vision to vibrant, three dimensional life.
If the sections devoted to "Pretty In Pink" (1986), where Hughes' relationship with Ringwald began to deteriorate, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986) as well as the rapidly violate pre-production cast and director changes of "Some Kind Of Wonderful" (1987) showcased just what miracles making movies actually are, especially ones that have been so beloved by generations of viewers for nearly 30 years, I particularly enjoyed reading about the film that truly inspired Hughes to take control of his material due to how much he despised the restrictive and dismissive process the movie business can be to writers.
Director Stan Dragoti's "Mr. Mom" (1983), which Hughes scripted and based upon his own experiences as a househusband and Father to his two young sons, is a film that Hughes had long expressed his displeasure, despite its box office success and pop cultural longevity. It was a film on which he was actually fired from and replaced with two uncredited writers who, as far as I am concerned, wrestled almost any sense of Hughes' artistic voice from the script and replaced it with a veritable blandness that even the extreme warmth, charm and humor of stars Michael Keaton and Teri Garr had to work overtime to counteract. What made this section so involving for me was that Honeycutt gives us the full backstory of the film, even giving us a window into the content of Hughes' original script, which surprisingly did not house the tenderness Hughes often employed in his material alongside the slapstick and satire. The original version of "Mr. Mom" was indeed an affair that was darker, meaner, more satirical and clearly still guided by his activities with the far nastier National Lampoon. While Hughes' re-writes did indeed soften the overall tone, it was not enough to keep him attached to the project, resulting in an experience that may have been one of the first seeds planted in his tumultuous relationship with Hollywood.
Returning to Chris Columbus' excellent Forward for a moment and my own palpable nervousness with what I would have met if I had ever encountered John Hughes face-to-face, Kirk Honeycutt provides copious information and stories relating to Hughes' aforementioned difficult relationship with Hollywood, and the erratic nature and voluminous anger that only seemed to increase once his films because even more successful (and demonstrably less personal and more formulaic). This aspect of John Hughes: A Life In Film did indeed give me tremendous interest as well as a certain sense of frustration. Not entirely with Hughes' behavior, which if we are to believe everyone's stories, is at times confusing at best and reprehensible at worst. My frustration simply comes from the fact that everything is speculative, therefore dulling any sense of actual insight Honeycutt may have been able to fully provide for the reader and Hughes fan.
As also written in Gora's book, it is well known that John Hughes experienced a closeness with Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall that he possibly felt was familial, which possibly made Ringwald and Hall's desires to artistically move onwards from him feel like personal betrayals, therefore leading to relationships that he extinguished. This was a pattern Hughes would repeat over and again throughout his career. While Howard Deutch retained a friendship with John Hughes by the end of his life, Deutch, who indeed directed three films for Hughes, fell in and out of Hughes' favor time and again, and usually without warning or reason.
Director Patrick Read Johnson also vividly recounts conversations and phone call session between himself and Hughes that ran the gamut from sensational to a tad bizarre to downright horrific. We learn that Hughes first hired Johnson to direct his live action adaptation of Hank Ketchum's classic comic strip series "Dennis The Menace" (1993), but fired and replaced him with Director Nick Castle only to re-hire him to direct the ambitious yet impersonal $50 million dollar budgeted epic comedy, "Baby's Day Out" (1994), itself a production fraught with mis-communications, re-edits and large, and public, verbal fights between himself and Hughes.
These are just two of many examples presented within John Hughes: A Life In Film that do indeed cause considerable discontent with regards to an aspect of Hughes' personality, at least when dealing with real people in a most unreal situation of the Hollywood dream machine. Scorned Executives even referred to Hughes' unpredictable and unrepentant stonewalling as being banished to the "cornfield," a reference to an episode of "The Twilight Zone" during which a mutant had the ability to banish its enemies into a cornfield from which they would never return.
This realization undoubtedly contains a level of surprise and disappointment because Hughes was a filmmaker who consistently created populist social comedies and critiques that, at their very best as demonstrated in his masterful "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" (1987) and "The Breakfast Club," went to great pains to illustrate the damage caused when people behave at their most callous and cruel and the heights to which our humanity can reach when we just show some sense of empathy. Even so, it seems that with John Hughes, those concepts may have been a bit of an inner struggle for himself, a man who seemingly wanted to create an additional family with his professional collaborators, whose feelings were easily wounded and whose anger was often unforgiving. "He was a tough personality," explained Marilyn Vance in the book. "John loved you, loved you, loved you, until he didn't love you anymore. He fell out with almost everybody he started with."
That is, except for John Candy.
Quite possibly the most unanswerable question regarding John Hughes was the reason or reasons he decided to completely walk away from Hollywood in the first place. As with his mood swings and personality shifts, for Honeycutt, Hughes' Hollywood departure is also up for speculation. But possibly, it was the death of John Candy in 1994 that shook Hughes to his core. John Candy seemed to be precisely the individual who became everything Hughes may have been looking for within his professional universe, a collaborator who could also exist as a cherished best friend and extended family member. The friendship between John Hughes and John Candy, by all accounts as presented by Honeycutt, was truly a relationship of great tenderness and affection as well as wondrous creative collaboration. The families of both men grew close together, vacationed together and reportedly have remained tightly intertwined after the respective passings of both patriarchs. "They were like brothers," expressed Candy's friend and business associate Bob Crane. "I never saw John (Hughes) connect with anyone like that,"echoed Vance.
Honeycutt makes considerable mention of how Hughes and Candy would habitually talk on the telephone for hours upon hours into the night, sharing stories and hatching ideas for projects they could share together, including the never filmed "Bartholomew Vs. Neff," a dueling neighbor comedy starring Candy and of all people, Sylvester Stallone and which Hughes would direct from his original screenplay. But as Crane explains in the book to Honeycutt, "You get those raw ideas. Then n come the deal-makers, attorneys, studio heads, publicity department, and it all changes from that raw, fun meeting or phone call as it starts to be 'developed.'"
Maybe this was the key to John Hughes' discomfort within Hollywood and his rising anger over the years. He was a writer to the end and when writing, the universe the writer creates is precisely and exclusively everything that writer wishes for it to be. Once more people are inevitably part of the process in the world of movie making, that original idea transforms more times than the writer may have ever anticipated or even wanted. Even when John Hughes became a one-man movie mogul, he was not an industry unto himself as the money handlers were always at the door with their ideas, suggestions and notes as well as the ability to say "No" at any conceivable time. Take this, plus his perpetual feelings of displacement in Hollywood as he preferred to remain in his beloved Chicago and then, the death of his best friend, I think we are able to connect the dots.
For a book that contains this wealth of information, it is not without its flaws. For example, I really do not think that the book is as complete as it could possibly be. Certainly, I'd love to read more about his days at National Lampoon and even hear about the stories he wrote for the magazine but that said, this is a book about Hughes' film career, not a full biography. Where Honeycutt falters is that there is.not nearly enough attention is given to Hughes' entire filmography, especially the films that Honeycutt obviously didn't like or care that much about. Yet, I feel that there is as much to learn about John Hughes from his successes as well as his failures, perceived or deserved.
For instance, I think that it's a shame that I know more about the debacle that was "Career Opportunities" (1991). That film, which was directed by Bryan Gordon with whom Hughes fought, and released by Universal Studios against Hughes' wishes just to spite him for his rages against studio executives was a project that Hughes wrote, produced and essentially disowned, calling it "vulgar" and feeling ashamed that his name was even on the final product. Just with those few sentences, I gave you more information than Honeycutt's book bothers to distribute about that film.
And what of the underrated "Dutch" (1991), which Hughes wrote and produced and hired Peter Faiman to direct? Not much either. How about "Curly Sue" (1991), the last film Hughes would ever direct himself, a film that had a six month plus shooting schedule as well as one that actors, including stars Alison Porter and Kelly Lynch, repeatedly stated that Hughes worked especially hard, but was ultimately the least energetic and least satisfying film to emerge under his directorial eye (although I do have a bit of a soft spot for it).
Most of all, what of "She's Having A Baby" (1988)? For me, that film is John Hughes' crowning jewel, the finest film he ever made and of course, the most personal by a mile. It was a film that was beleaguered by a Hollywood strike, which derailed the editing sessions and forced it from its originally intended slot as a June 1987 release as well as serving as the bridge from the high school films to more adult characters. The film was a rare box office flop for Hughes which then signaled the beginning of making his cinematic output less personal and individualistic. I would think that there was a wealth of material to be discovered, gained and presented from that one film alone, and Honeycutt does not include any of it.
Furthermore, what of the films that Hughes announced and never realized? While we do read a little bit about projects like "Oil And Vinegar" (which was to star Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald and either Hughes or Deutch would direct) and "The Bee" (more on that later) what about projects like "Black Cat Bone: The Return Of Huckleberry Finn," "The Nanny Fox," "The Bugster," or his adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan? Not one word on those or others and extremely disappointing indeed as all of the omissions felt like missed opportunities to create a book that was truly indispensable.
And yet, even with the flaws and all of the darker material presented, Kirk Honeycutt firmly utilizes John Hughes: A Life In Film as a celebratory and reverential exploration of a filmmaker who was unquestionably unlike any other, creatively audacious and often very much ahead of the curve. Not only was he the writer, producer and/or director of his projects, he handled the advertising, both professional and guerrilla, from writing the copy for the one-sheet posters himself and supervising the trailers to personally placing promotional stickers upon streetlight lampposts. He handpicked the music utilized in the films and even wrote the letters to his fan club mailing list himself as well (something that I have seen and am still smarting that I had never found my name upon any distribution lists considering how many fan letters I wrote). He distinctly understood the concept of building an audience by having one film playing in theaters just as the follow-up was being made (sounds like the Marvel universe now doesn't it?).
And returning to the unmade film "The Bee," which Hughes had originally planned to direct himself, he conceptualized a Chaplin-esque, almost silent movie as it featured a scant 10 pages of dialogue within his 120 page screenplay, and was entirely through the point of view of a bee. This idea was essentially 20 years ahead of its time as in the early to mid 1990's, such a film would have been impossible to make unless it was animated (a possibility Hughes toyed with) but in 2015, with CGI technology, "The Bee" would have been perfectly logical to realize.
John Hughes never received very much respect and credit for his work while he was alive (perhaps something else that punctured his sensitivities and fueled his discontent) but I do think that Kirk Honeycutt's book goes a long way in creating a tribute for the Hughes novice, casual fan and connoisseur. After reading the book and thinking again if whether I would have still wanted to meet him in person now knowing what I know, I think that even despite my nervousness, I would still want that one chance to thank him, to credit him, to show him that the work he embarked upon throughout much of his life was indeed more than worth any of the trouble, strain and frustration because his work touched my soul completely and deeply, inspiring me in more ways than he could have ever imagined possible. John Hughes' life in film had meaning and was indeed meaningful.
For it has meant everything in the world to me.
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